Most large organisations have a chief information officer, or CIO. However, almost all of these organisations have accorded this role too narrow a set of roles and responsibilities.
Think of the title CIO and what springs to mind? Banks of mainframes, servers and storage devices? Large, monolithic applications, and databases; long-term decisions in terms of operating systems, software, networks and process definitions. Enterprise architecture decisions, software development and return on IT investment. It makes sense ... after all, millions, even billions, are spent annually on IT infrastructure.
The mere allocation of responsibility for physical records to the CIO will not immediately solve all organisational challenges.
Paul Mullon, Metrofile`s information governance executive
What of documents? What of corporate records that do not fit into the structured, digitised world of IT? Should physical records not also form part of the CIO`s job description, roles and responsibilities?
Instead, responsibility for physical records tends to fall between stools: some of it is managed by IT; some by facilities management; and some by departments.
That the CIO doesn`t have overall responsibility is a bit of an anomaly, and it`s costing organisations millions in duplication of effort, lost productivity and opportunity cost - and poor customer service.
Xerox has reported that 15% to 25% of corporate revenue is spent on managing documents, but 90% of organisations do not know where their documents are.
The costs tend to be tied up in departmental budgets, making it difficult to quantify precisely. How, for example, do you allocate a fixed figure when the costs are made up from slices of everyone`s time? If everyone spends 10% of their time on finding, printing, duplicating, storing and managing information, this is a big expense, but not easily reported on.
For similar reasons, it is also difficult to quantify the exact return on investment. But, if we know that between 15% and 25% of organisational costs are tied up in the management of documents, it makes sense that they should be accorded at least as high a level of executive attention as IT enjoys.
That means the CIO should be responsible for records too. For this to occur, two things need to happen:
* The CIO should have an overall responsibility for information - only part of which is held in digital systems. One of the people reporting into him should be an IT officer, doing exactly what the name suggests. The CIO needs to sit on the board or at least exco - after all, he controls 15% to 25% of organisational expenses.
* Secondly, a steering committee should be created in every organisation, and have responsibility for bringing together compliance, risk management, IT, records management, legal issues, and operational issues as they relate to information management. This is a critical committee which needs to have senior management sponsorship as it cuts across operational silos.
These two functions (CIO and the steering committee) together should have a mandate to reduce costs, improve efficiencies, and meet information compliance requirements across the organisation.
Organisations which do this will achieve the following:
* Make a significant improvement to bottom line profitability.
* Reduce duplication of documents currently held in both paper and electronic format.
* Build a platform on which information sharing and knowledge management can become a reality - rather than just managing the structured, digital information that flows through every organisation.
* Drastically improve productivity and operational efficiencies.
* Meet corporate governance, compliance and risk management requirements (those that relate to information, and most do).
* Improve customer service at reduced cost.
There are no silver bullets in business, and the mere allocation of responsibility for physical records to the CIO will not immediately solve all organisational challenges. But it would represent a solid start, and begin laying a foundation for improved business.
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